Lewis Lloyd
Current Employer/Organisation Name
Deliveroo
What have you been doing since leaving Exeter, and what are you doing now?
At Deliveroo, I work on real-time, distributed event streaming via Apache Kafka, enabling communication between systems and services across the company. I also worked at a couple of start-ups before Deliveroo, focusing on web applications and data pipelines, which enabled me to move to London in the first place.
Why did you choose this career? And what do you enjoy most about your work?
Software is ubiquitous and impacts every person, every day, everywhere, and seeing the real-world effects of your work is incredibly satisfying. The field itself is full of interesting challenges at massive scale, and an abundance of friendly, engaging and humble people to work with.
Please tell us if you were a member of any societies, groups or sports clubs?
Computer Science Society (President ‘21–‘22, Social Secretary ‘19–‘20)
What did you enjoy most about your programme and what was the biggest highlight?
The group-based software engineering projects, including the demo days at the end, were great opportunities to collaborate on a long-term project and to learn from other students.
What did you most enjoy about studying here?
Studying and working alongside highly-motivated and engaged students, which pushes you to learn, to explore, and to be ambitious.
Why did you choose to study at Exeter?
It’s a respected, prestigious university based in a cosy, friendly city. It has a decent reputation for Computer Science in the UK. A personal factor was also that it’s only 40 miles from my parents’ house, which was home at the time.
What skills and experiences have been most useful for your career?
In Exeter’s Computer Science programme, the breadth of knowledge forces you out of your comfort zone. Hobbyists rarely touch languages like C, Haskell and Prolog, or explore algorithms like Floyd-Warshall and A*, but understanding them will make you a fundamentally better programmer.
What advice would you give to a current student who wishes to pursue your career?
Read the Tech Interview Handbook, and get good at LeetCode, systems design and behavioural interviews. Build end-to-end projects (frontend, backend, database, infrastructure) in your own time to understand modern software stacks. Spend as much time on the harder languages, data structure and algorithms as the easier ones.
What are your plans for the future?
My current ambition is to become a Staff Engineer. I’d like to stay in the world of distributed data problems, whether working with Kafka, key-value stores, real-time operational connectivity, or anything else related, as data offers a unique problem space to work on.
